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Editor's pick

Howdy Cognitive UXers! 😉 Be aware of that from time to time I’ll pick articles, which arouse my interest so much that I’ll highlight them. The next one could be yours! 🚀"The first rule of user research: never ask anyone what they want.
— Erika Hall, Just Enough Research
I rave about user interviews. They’re cheap (see: free), potent (you get more than what you ask for), and efficient (you only really need to talk to five people). But good interviewing takes practice.
It helps if you’re naturally curious about people, but if you aren’t, you can still fake it till you make it. For example, Michael Margolis of Google Ventures likes to get into character."

Human Cognition

How do we process information? In cognitive psychology, there are two famous processes involved on how we interpret information – and as humans, we constantly use both: Top-down processing and bottom-up processing.
As we have seen perception and information processing are not objective – which means simply because there are certain elements placed somewhere, does not mean that people will see and use those elements. The way we look for information is not only feature driven (or data-driven which equals bottom-up processing) but also context-driven or expectation-driven which equals top-down processing.

Human Decision Making

Reversible vs. irreversible decisions. We often think that collecting as much information as possible will help us make the best decisions. Sometimes that's true, but sometimes it hamstrings our progress. Other times it can be flat out dangerous.
Many of the most successful people adopt simple, versatile decision-making heuristics to remove the need for deliberation in particular situations.

Human Memory

Human working memory holds information relevant to the current task; when tasks are too hard, users should be able to offload some of the working-memory burden to user-interface features that can serve as an external memory. Human working memory can be conceptualized as a buffer or scratchpad in which the mind deposits information relevant to the current task.

Human, AI and UX

It’s hard to believe AI can interact with people this naturally. Onstage at I/O 2018, Google showed off a jaw-dropping new capability of Google Assistant: in the not too distant future, it’s going to make phone calls on your behalf. CEO Sundar Pichai played back a phone call recording that he said was placed by the Assistant to a hair salon. The voice sounded incredibly natural; the person on the other end had no idea they were talking to a digital AI helper. Google Assistant even dropped in a super casual “mmhmmm” early in the conversation.

Books and Resources 📖

This book contains some profoundly important concepts around how people make decisions. It will help you understand why humans sometimes make errors in judgment, and how to look for signs that you yourself may be about to make a System 1 error. Here are some of the most important takeaways from the book. We have a Two System way of thinking - System 1 (Thinking Fast), System 2 (Thinking Slow).

System 1 is the intuitive, “gut reaction” way of thinking and making decisions. System 2 is the analytical, “critical thinking” way of making decisions. System 1 forms “first impressions” and often is the reason why we jump to conclusions. System 2 does reflection, problem-solving, and analysis.